Puts the garbage-strewn beaches of Japan to shame, if I may boast. This is Lacounts Beach, but the whole outer Cape is one continuous beach with various names along the way. You can bring your dog and make a fire and do whatever else makes you happy.

Tomorrow is my last day here, and with an early flight on Sunday morning I will have a subdued New Year’s Eve, bringing to a close a subdued but soul-replenishing stay here in my hometown. Chances are the next post will be from Japan, but you never know…

This picture is from the far side of the Great Salt Marsh, which I mentioned in my previous post. Straight ahead is the beach from the last post, Sandy Neck. Those are the dunes that I walked through, and beyond them is Cape Cod Bay.

Two more days left here on Cape Cod. As much as I’m enjoying the peace and quiet, I am very much looking forward to seeing my wife and son again, if not the long trip that will reunite us. I’m hoping for a drive down to the National Seashore tomorrow morning, so more pictures to look forward to.

Good night.

Cars are allowed on a portion of Sandy Neck, and owners of the few cottages among the dunes are permitted to drive along the trails, but there is nobody around this time of year.

I don’t recall seeing frost on sand before but it was one of the first things that caught my eye this morning.

Sandy Neck is about seven miles long, so the dunes roll on for quite a distance. This is all protected, the beach grasses and other plants and animals that live in the dunes, and in theory you aren’t supposed to leave the marked trails. Most people are respectful but you can always see footprints leading off the trail. Who wouldn’t want to venture in a little deeper, though?

It only takes about 20 minutes to walk from the backside of the beach to the ocean.

The water was as glassy as I’ve ever seen it.

Meanwhile, halfway across the world…

My trip started from Chieko’s hometown in Niigata, where it was and is snowing like the dickens. I usually get a little nervous about flying and making long trips, and that feeling was amplified a bit this time around with some anxiety about leaving Chieko and Ray behind.

I hopped a bullet train to Tokyo Station, about 1 1/2 hours away.

From there I boarded the Narita Express, which takes you to the airport in about an hour. I passed Tokyo’s newest monstrosity, the Sky Tree. It is huge.

I enjoyed a few pre-boarding glasses of wine as the sun set behind the plane that would be my home for the next 11 hours. The flight itself was fine aside from the part where I spilled wine all over my seat and pants. That was uncomfortable for a while, but fortunately I had two empty seats next to me so I could contort myself into some positions that were more conducive to sleeping than just sitting upright in a puddle of red wine.

After a brief layover in Chicago, where I caught the end of the Patriot’s game on TV, I boarded my short flight to Boston.

The hour drive from Boston to Cape Cod is always the most grueling part of the trip — so close, but not quite there. But we made it eventually. It’s good to be home, again.

After two days without jetlag, I thought I was in the clear. But here I am at 4:40 in the morning writing a blog, after hitting the wall and going to bed at 8:30 last night.

This is a very low key trip, and I’m content to do nothing but spend time with my family, visit a few friends, take trips to the beach, and eat more bacon than any man should. So far, so good.

There was a pretty good swell and all kinds of dramatic winter light. The ocean here is much more photogenic in the winter than in the summer.

I’m ashamed to say that having come this far in life, earning a degree in literature along the way, I had until very recently (like last week) never read anything by Ernest Hemingway. How did that happen? But I’m ploughing my way through A Moveable Feast, and it’s time to spend some time doing that now before I call it a day. Good night.

Life has gotten in the way of this blog that is ostensibly about my life, at least the interesting parts with pretty pictures. Unfortunately there has been little of interest and virtually no pictures, pretty or otherwise, in the past few weeks. Couple that with the sick boy above, who spent the latter part of the week fighting 104 degree temps and worrying his parents, and you see how I am grateful to be sitting here in the kotatsu nursing a bottle of wine with a normal-temperatured kid sleeping in the next room.

Sick kids suck. From the perspective of a parent (weird that I can speak with that kind of authority), sick kids get you on two levels. First is that you are worried about them and want them to get better, and of course hate seeing them in a compromised, uncomfortable state. The second way is that they completely screw up the schedule, at least in our family where Chieko and I both work. Uneasy sleep is complicated by figuring out the morning logistics of whether or not to cancel classes, and if not, what time we need to leave to get the boy to sick-kid daycare, and on and on. But you get through it, and like all things in life in retrospect it’s not as bad as it seems at the time. I’m enjoying the retrospect here in this kotatsu, with this glass of wine.

And this time next week I will  be high above the Pacific Ocean, or perhaps making landfall above Alaska, flying home for my first Christmas in America since I moved to Japan nearly 8 years ago.  A quick trip, sans wife and son and unborn son. But there are a long 7 days between then and now, and I’m only processing things 24 hours at a time right now. And that means all I can see ahead of me is another glass of wine (or two), a good night sleep, a Bruins game in the morning, an trip to the gym, and then things start getting foggy.

Hoping to get my blogging mojo back over the winter break, so until then…happy holidays!

The presentation was a panel discussion with three women (Canadian, Indian, American) who are all married to Japanese men and raising children bilingually and bi-culturally here in Japan. The focus of the discussion was teenaged bilinguals, so not necessarily applicable to our situation now, but something we’ll be dealing with later on. I didn’t come away from the presentation with any miracle techniques on how to raise children bilingually, but rather with the realization that Chieko and I are by no means alone in our efforts. I don’t know why I felt a sense of isolation before, after all we have friends and colleagues who are trying to raise their children with tow languages and cultures. I suppose I just haven’t talked to anyone who is further down the line than us or our friends, who all have young children.

So I’ll just cover a couple of the points that I found more surprising or interesting.

First, all three women said their children’s English improved when they entered junior high school. I’m not alone in regarding Japanese English education as deeply flawed, so this was curious. However, the rote practice of writing alphabet letters and vocabulary over and over and over again, coupled with the grammar-intensive approach to language teaching, was the missing link for these kids. According to their mothers, the kids all had great, fluent speaking skills, but lacked in reading/writing until they got into junior high school.

Other issues they faced that were interesting: being self-conscious of having natural pronunciation compared to the kantakana-ized pronunciation that a lot of teachers/students use when speaking English here; issues of having better English skills than the the teacher in many cases; obviously, getting some heat from classmates and bullied to some extent, but nothing too heinous, and their English skill became an asset, something cool, as they moved into high school.

Another thing that was surprising to me was how much the women recommended having kids take the Eiken/Step test. I wasn’t crazy about this idea since it feeds into the whole test-taking culture in Japan, but their logic made sense to me on two levels. First, it gives the kids a challenge that they don’t normally face in their school English classes. Second, when they apply to high schools, having a high English score can go a long way into getting accepted into a better private or public school even if their other grades are lacking. So that’s something to consider.

Although Chieko and I haven’t talked about it much at these early stages, I want to ensure that our kids spend a good chunk of time in the States both for their English and to learn about that half of their heritage. To this end, the Canadian woman takes her family back to Canada for a month or so during the summer every year. The Indian woman sent her daughter to Australia for a summer, so home stays are also a good option. I can’t recall how often the American woman takes her kids home.

Regarding family dynamics, the American woman’s family was the only one of the three in which both parents spoke consistent English to the kids.

In our house, we both speak English to Ray nearly all the time. He gets Japanese all day at daycare. Granted he’s only two, but so far Ray is as bilingual as a two year old could be. He speaks English to both Chieko and I in the house, but seems to realize that Japanese is spoken outside the house. We pump him full of English books, DVDs, daily Skype sessions with grandparents in America. It’s going swimmingly so far, but we’ll see what happens when he realizes he has free will and a self-esteem complex!

What was most interesting for me was to hear how other people are going about raising bilingual kids. If anyone is interested in reading some case studies you can find a bunch HERE. There are some other interesting-looking resources there as well.

I’m curious to hear what other people are doing towards raising kids bilingually. What language do you speak at home? Do your kids willfully speak English? What language to siblings speak to each other? How much contact do they have with other native English speakers?

OTHER NEWS

Chieko’s parents came to visit us Ray this weekend, and yesterday morning Chieko’s dad and I took a drive to see a waterfall, and then up a mountain to get a nice view out over the water to the west and the mountains in every other direction. A few mediocre pictures. Winter’s on its way.

Time for bed here. Good night.

Today I went to the annual JALT conference (Japan Association of Language Teachers). I’d never been before but felt compelled to go for some reason this year. It was interesting. For one thing, it’s weird to be around so many foreigners. For another, everyone seems to take themselves really fuxxing seriously, which I suppose is OK but it doesn’t seem like a lot of them really mean it. But I hesitate to judge because I haven’t done anything. I’m grateful that I could get a sense of what I should (or shouldn’t) try to emulate if and when I take the stage.

But the whole experience left kind of a funny taste in my mouth. I’m not comfortable being around these people who all seem hell-bent on proving…something. The whole scene seemed to lack sincerity, like everyone was just going through the motions so they could put a JALT presentation on their resume.

And nearly every presentation I attended had some tweaker in it that got on my nerves, who in the guise of asking a question ended up talking all about themselves for much longer than anyone cared, or totally ruined the presenter’s rhythm or otherwise detracted from the matter at hand with random comments/questions/hostility.

But I did see some learn some interesting things, especially regarding raising bilingual/bicultural children, the shocker being that I actually gained some confidence in the Japanese education system.

And then it was back to the airport, where I fell off the wagon slightly and then had to sit on my plane for 2 hours until the wind changed direction and we could take off. In the end a very long day for not a lot of gratification, but not totally without merit.

The tone of his first birthday was more like “Hey, we didn’t kill him for a whole year!” His second birthday, for me at least, is more of a reminder of how fast time goes by. And, of course, “Hey, we still haven’t killed him!” Perhaps we’re doing OK at this parenting business (knock on wood). There are more pictures on Flickr if you need more Ray.

I’m heading to Tokyo for the day tomorrow to attend a teaching conference. I’m flying out in the morning and flying back in the evening, so it will be a busy day. Other noteworthy events in my life include the fact that I haven’t had any booze for two weeks, which is quite an achievement for me. I’ve also been eating like a bird and working out like a maniac, and slowly but surely the extra kilos and flab are starting to disappear. Another couple of kilos and I’ll be falling off the wagon.

Could have sworn I had something else to talk about, but my brain is shutting down and if I did actually have something in mind, it’s long gone. I best hit the sack anyway — early start tomorrow. I’m dragging my camera along in hopes of getting some pictures, but I tend to suck at urban photography. I need sunbeams and mountains and water. But we’ll see how it goes…

Happy birthday to my boy. Good night.

He’ll be here in April.